


The Gull

by draculard



Category: The Lighthouse (2019)
Genre: Ambiguous Character Identity, Blood and Injury, Ghosts, HMS Friday, Hallucinations, Identity Issues, Insanity, M/M, Mild descriptions of animal cruelty, References to 19th Century urban legends, Reincarnation, Sailors' superstitions, Shipwrecks, St. Elmo's Fire - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25195765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: That night, past midnight, a gull taps on the window. One of them rolls over in bed and whispers, “Winslow;” it comes out sounding like a prayer.Thomas can’t tell which of them is speaking.
Relationships: Thomas Wake & Ephraim Winslow, Thomas Wake/Ephraim Winslow
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	The Gull

The bird looks him in the eye. Has he ever been looked in the eye by a bird before? Has he ever seen a bird stand so still?

All gulls are like that, he tells himself. They swarm you at the beach, they walk right up to humans all the time asking for food. Really, it’s not so unusual to see a gull close-up, or for it to stand so perfectly still, or for its one eye to stare right into yours.

But his voice is shaking when he says, “Get.”

The gull stays.

He waves his hand; the sudden movement doesn’t startle the bird. It cocks its head at him, but it doesn’t budge.

“Get!” he yells. He kicks his foot from behind the wheelbarrow, throwing his leg out at an awkward angle that has no chance of really striking the gull. Its throat bobs, Thomas’s foot falling short of its chest; it doesn’t move. “Get!” he says again. “Get, you stupid bastard! I need to get to that door!”

But the seagull stays where it is. He tightens his fingers on the wheelbarrow handles until the wood stings his palms, leaves blisters in its wake. He glowers, but the seagull doesn’t move.

It guards the lighthouse door.

* * *

The sky is red that morning; he sees it when he’s emptying the chamber pots. With the gulls squawking overhead — with the foghorn wailing in the distance — he stares out at the horizon. He adjusts his feet, finds a place to balance on the slippery rocks, a place where the wind may buffet him but won’t blow him over into the waves.

He stares at the sun without blinking. The chamber pots hang empty in his hands, the cold porcelain gradually turning his hands to blocks of ice. Shivers wrack his body, but he doesn’t blink. He doesn’t look away.

From one foghorn blast to the next, he doesn’t breathe. 

* * *

“Friday?” he says aloud.

He squints at the antique triptychon, trying to make out the date in the dark. Moving away, he strikes one of the white phosphorous matches and lights a lantern, bringing it close to the calendar again. It must have been magnificent once — fifty years ago, when some ill-brained wickie brought it on the boat. But now the frame is chipped, the calendar displays water-stained, the wood warped from too many floods.

But the lantern light reveals he was right. Today is Friday. A hard knot forms in his stomach.

“ _Dies Infaustus,_ ” he says.

“What?” says Thomas from the breakfast table. He looks over his shoulder, eyes the tin coffee mug still hovering near Thomas’s lips.

“It’s Friday,” he says.

“Friday?”

“ _Dies Infaustus,_ ” Thomas confirms with a nod.

His companion is silent, blinking down into the coffee. “ _Dies Infaustus,_ ” he repeats.

He doesn’t say it with the awe or fear it deserves, and suddenly Thomas feels silly. He turns his back on the triptychon, sets the lantern down on the breakfast table with a thump and takes a seat.

“ _Her keel was laid on a Friday,_ ” Thomas says to himself, under his breath and with rhythm, as if reciting a poem he’s heard many times before. “ _She was launched on a Friday. She set sail on her maiden voyage on a Friday, and her captain, he was named James Friday_.”

Thomas folds his arms, stares down at the missing slivers of wood in the tabletop. Gouges dot the surface here and there, like someone long-past has taken his knife and leveraged splinters out of it for fun.

“ _And she was never seen again,_ ” Thomas says.

He takes a sip of coffee, eyes downcast. 

He doesn’t notice his companion’s flinty gaze.

* * *

Under the sound of the foghorn that night, he swears he hears a woman singing from the sea.

* * *

“I was born polydactyl, you know,” Thomas says, the smell of alcohol on his breath. He lifts his hand, spreads his fingers. The lantern light bounces off a crescent-shaped scar next to his pinkie. It seems to flash silver.

“Polydactyl,” Thomas repeats, voice flat.

“Aye. Extra finger, right here.” With shaky hands, Thomas lays the pad of his thumb over the scar. He looks away, into the middle-distance — his eyes shift to the darkened window; outside, the wind howls and the shutters bang against the wall.

“What happened to it?” Thomas asks. He muscles through a swig of liquor so strong it taste like paint. “Sailing accident?” he asks, voice raspy now. Then, with a little humor, “Siren bite it off?”

He remembers last night and his smile disappears. His stomach sours. He takes another drink.

“Siren bite it off,” Thomas mutters, huffing out a laugh. He folds his left hand over the right, hiding the scar. “No,” he says. “Polydactyl cats, them are good luck, you know? Catch rats better than anything in the world. You get a polydactyl black cat on your ship, you can weather anything.”

He looks out the window.

“Polydactyl sailors, though…” he says.

Thomas watches him for a while, but the silence remains unbroken. In time, he looks down at his own hands, vision blurry from the drink.

He blinks. He sees open gashes on his left hand, blood congealing, turning black; skin gangrenous, all colors of the peacock’s tail. He blinks again and his skin is fine, unblemished, uninjured.

He curls his hands into fists and stares out the window, too.

* * *

That night, past midnight, a gull taps on the window. One of them rolls over in bed and whispers, “Winslow;” it comes out sounding like a prayer. 

Thomas can’t tell which of them is speaking.

* * *

There’s an old wooden post on the south side of the island, behind the lighthouse, behind their quarters. It’s buried deep in the ground, surrounded by slabs of rock. It must have taken entire teams of men to move those rocks there, Thomas thinks. 

On a stormy day, when he can stand to be outside despite the wind and rain, he looks up at that pole. He sees light dancing over the top of it — sprites jumping, flashing, streaming up into the sky.

 _Electrical discharge,_ he tells himself.

 _St. Elmo’s Fire,_ another person whispers in his head.

The wind cuts right through his coat, right through his sweater, but he only crosses his arms over his chest and stays to watch until the discharge fades away.

* * *

Thomas sleeps barefoot, and that’s how the other Thomas notices the tattoos. He’s lying awake at night, kept up by the pecking of the gull at the window. The sound of that beakpoint driving into the glass has a rhythm — five seconds between each peck, invariably — but it isn’t comforting, not like the sounds of rain and thunder are comforting. It keeps him awake.

He rolls over, turns the other way as if that will make the seagull disappear. He rests his chin on folded arms, looks over at Thomas’s bed. Sees those bare feet sticking out from under the blanket.

On the sole of Thomas’s left foot, faded and poorly drawn, is a pig.

On his right foot, clearly etched by the same incompetent hand, is a hen.

“Because they can’t swim,” Thomas tells him in the morning, and he doesn’t explain it any further. Thomas imagines livestock in wooden crates, hens squawking as a ship rocks on the waves, pigs snuffling and sitting in their own filth in a box too small for any living thing. He pictures a hull shattered by ice; he pictures a man — a sailor, a logger — slipping under the water and never coming up again.

In his mind, every sailor drowns eventually. Even the ones who can swim; even the best swimmers are dragged beneath the waves; even those in lifeboats starve or freeze before they make it to land. But the pigs and the hens in their wooden cages? Wood floats. 

He closes his eyes and sees them bobbing to safety, confined but alive. He opens his eyes and sees the white stone wall of the lighthouse before him.

He looks up at the light.

* * *

The gull pecks his hand when he’s trying to feed it, trying to make friends. Its beak comes down on the soft web of skin between his thumb and forefingers; it tears away flesh and muscles, leaves a gaping, bleeding hole, and Thomas stares at it without wincing.

It’ll leave a crescent-shaped scar, he thinks. Just like the one on the other side of his pinkie, where his extra finger used to be — the one that brought him luck before he cut it off.

He watches the gull as it flies away with Thomas’s skin caught in his beak. Dead sailors come back as seagulls; he knows this, everyone knows it. Their souls float off to Fiddler’s Green; their souls go down to Davy Jones’s Locker; their souls come back as cormorants, their souls come back as souls.

He sucks his wound dry instead of cleaning it. 

Where do lighthouse-keepers’ souls go?

What has he come back as?


End file.
